All too often our ingenuity seems to outwit our wisdom. A case in point is the discovery and production of PFAS chemicals. Its first iteration was created in 1938 by Roy J. Plunkett, the accidental result of some scientific tinkering while searching for a better refrigerant gas. He had inadvertently discovered an artificial compound that was “impervious to heat and chemical degradation and also extremely slippery”, as well as being water and oil repellent (Graham Lawton in New Scientist “Everyday Toxins”, May 11, 2024). We know this substance as the commercial product called Teflon, now produced at more than 200,000 tonnes per year.

Teflon was the first of a new class of about 16,000 chemicals called perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). Their uses have expanded from the non-stick surface of cookware to water-proofing outdoor wear, as stain-resistant additives to furniture and carpets, as waxing on skis, in paints, firefighting foams, cosmetic products and even food packaging. We can always find a use for a product that has miraculous properties.

Unfortunately, the fluorine bond to the carbon atoms is so stable that almost nothing seems to deconstruct it. These compounds will probably last hundreds or even thousands of years, hence the term “forever chemicals”.

“Being so stable and inert, the prevailing view was that these chemicals couldn’t do much harm,” writes Lawton. But we have discovered otherwise. PFAS are now being “linked to cancer, immune dysfunction, kidney disease and more.” And they are now found virtually everywhere: in drinking water, in soil, sewage, fetuses, mother’s milk, in household dust and about 98% of the Americans whose blood has been sampled.

Two particular kinds of PFAS, those known as perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) are already being regulated by the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, but these chemicals are already in the environment, causing miscellaneous health problems. So much for inert chemicals that were not supposed to interact with anything.

Bioremediation offers some hope for removing PFAS compounds. Filtration is a possibility as well as extreme heat, but all these options are extremely expensive and technologically complex. A better option would have been to question the premise that the mass-production and distribution of a “forever chemical” was a good idea. This doubt did occur to a few people, but the convenience, utility and profitability of the PFAS made them an irresistible temptation to mass-produce and market.

More and more, however, we are starting to resemble the sorcerer’s apprentice who knows how to empower the broom to get water but doesn’t know how to stop it. We know enough to invent ingenious things, but we are not smart enough to imagine the consequences of releasing them into the environment. Nanoparticles should be a current worry.

The mistakes are beginning to accumulate. DDT was supposed to be the miracle cure to our insect problems. It was originally marketed as totally benign. Housewives were shown merrily dusting their suburban lawns while their children played happily in the grass. That was before the proliferation of various cancers, the collapse of bird populations, genetic damage, and the environmental trauma in aquatic flora and fauna.

Like DDT and PFAS, CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) were deemed to be inert and safe. They were widely used as a refrigerant until the 1980s when we discovered that their chlorine atom was acting as a catalyst to rob the ozone O₃ molecule of one of its oxygens, thereby dismantling our planet’s protection from damaging ultraviolet-B radiation. It was the Montreal Protocol of 1987 that banned the use of CFCs and set in slow motion the recovery of the ozone layer.

This disaster was serious enough. But a sobering subtext to this near-ecological catastrophe is that, also in the1930s, the inventor of CFCs, Thomas Midgley Jr., tried bromine as one of the components in the refrigerant, but it was not quite as useful as the chlorine in the chlorofluorocarbons, so it did not go into industrial production. Had a bromofluorocarbon (BFC) been used instead of a CFC, the catalytic reaction with the ozone would have been 50 times faster, and we would probably have been irradiated from space before the ozone depletion could have been stopped. We escaped that catastrophe by dumb luck.

Our ingenuity has made our modern civilization into the wonder that it is. We are responsible for remarkably intelligent inventions that have eased the burden of living while extending lifespans—the average global life expectancy since 1950 has increased from less than 30 years to 72. Life need not be “nasty, brutish and short” as the 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes called it. But the human story is not over. And, assuming we don’t initiate a nuclear holocaust, the course of our future will depend on an ingenuity that is much more restrained by caution and much better supervised by wisdom.

Ray Grigg for Sierra Quadra 

Top image credit: Egg being cooked in a teflon frying pan – Photo by Martin Cathrae via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)